I decided to chuck the LC55 for a while and go with straight 300mm zoom. I know I'm not very good at exposing white flowers, but that's all I have in my yard at the moment.....Would appreciate your advice.

Beautiful shots Saly love the color of the California Bees! And the sharpness is great...there is no set of rules for Macros/Close ups as far as I am concerned whatever works the best and easiest to get some great shots...

LTZ, thanks for the encouragement, means a lot. I used a tripod with these shots, maybe that's the secret. These bees seem to take on the color of the flowers they go to, by getting covered in different color pollen, and their wings reflect the color of the flower.

It really does not help to much at 300mm and small aperture. You really want to shoot that on a tripod. You are talking about really slow shutter speeds at f16-f22 and 200iso. Unless you want to push up the iso to 800, that will help you pick up shutter speed to avoid camera shake.

Personally all my really tight in macro shots are taken on a tripod. But my hand held stuff I back up to 100-150mm when using the long zoom.